South Korean electronics giant Samsung on August 8 introduced the Galaxy Note 9. The smartphone is launching in India on August 22, exclusively on Amazon. While the smartphone shares a lot with its predecessor, it also gets some major improvements such as a new Bluetooth-enable S-Pen, a new dual camera module on the back, better internal storage and RAM options and enhanced DeX experience. The most important thing is that the phone is priced the same (Rs 67,900) as its predecessor i.e. Samsung Galaxy Note 8, when it was launched.

The S-Pen has always been one of the key differentiating factors for Samsung Galaxy Note-series smartphones. In the previous iterations, the S-Pen functionality was more or less limited to digital inking capabilities. However, in the Galaxy Note 9, the S-Pen is Bluetooth-enabled that allows it to control select mobile phone features such as camera, YouTube, etc., along with regular inking capabilities. With the new S-Pen, for an example, you can long press the key to open the camera, single press the key to take shot and double press it to switch between the front and rear camera.

Like the Samsung Galaxy S9-series, the Galaxy Note 9 sports dual 12-megapixel cameras on the back. The primary sensor features a variable aperture lens (f/1.5 – f/2.4) and the secondary sensor is a telephoto lens. Variable aperture allows the phone to adjust aperture based on lighting conditions in auto mode. In the manual mode, the aperture can be set either to bright f/1.5 or smaller f/2.4, based on user preference. The secondary telephoto lens enables 2x zoom capabilities, along with portrait mode and enhanced bokeh effect.

Thought the camera module has been taken from the Galaxy S9-series, the Galaxy Note 9 also gets intelligent scene recognition that automatically recognises scene and adjusts the settings accordingly. This is something similar to how the camera modules in artificial intelligence-capable smartphone work.

This is another feature taken from the Galaxy S9-series. The Galaxy Note 9 features dual speakers, custom-tuned by audio experts at AKG. The Galaxy Note 9 is powered by a 4,000 mAh battery, which is 500 mAh more than the one found in the Galaxy S9+ and 700 mAh more than its predecessor, the Note 8.

Samsung DeX has come a long way since inception. The DeX turns a monitor or television into a smart computer for enhanced desktop experience, when connected with select Samsung smartphones. With the Galaxy Note 9, the DeX computing experience has become much simpler and easy to use. For DeX to work, the Note 9 does not require a dock. Instead, it now also works with a regular HDMI cable.